The Second Plane by Martin Amis

Kingsley Amis's son has always had plenty of people to hate him. His imagined patrimony, his early success, his implausible virtuosity and his fearlessness have ensured that many who weren't actually offended by him were envious.

It was probably inevitable that Martin Amis would attract the bitter dislike of the more ideologically policed section of the liberal-left intelligentsia. In the past couple of years there has been a slow excommunication from the broad church - with good reviews turned into bad in the London Review of Books - and then last year, the full auto-da-f� - conducted principally in The Guardian, with members of the round-robinocracy, led by Terry Eagleton, waiting their turn to add a faggot to the flames.

Amis's apostasy was not, as it was with others, over the Iraq War. This collection of writings mostly from newspapers on events since September 11, 2001, reminds readers that he always opposed the invasion. In March 2003, he gave warning that the “intellectually null” George Bush, “a tax-cutting dry drunk from West Texas” was leading his country into a disastrous trap, ineluctably provoking, inter alia, “an additional generation of terror from militant Islam”. If Amis is open to any criticism over Iraq, it is that he explores Saddam Hussein's science-fiction bloodiness - as he does in the short story In the Palace of the End - without the slightest realistic notion of how it might be brought to a conclusion.

The proximate cause of Amis's being run out of Lib-town was an interview that he had given to Ginny Dougary of this newspaper. In it he examined his own emotional and political reaction to the London bombings and confessed to a punitive urge - “don't you feel it?” - to somehow force the Muslim community to get its house in order. These were the sentiments described by Eagleton as being appropriate to a “British National Party thug”.

But the actual cause was different again. It was fairly obvious that Amis wasn't advocating discriminatory action against Muslims, and that his views on responsibility were far more nuanced than the “urge” he described. As Eagelton refined his argument, his objection was to “Amis's panic-stricken reaction to 9/11”, especially given that Amis was with his (unspecified) political allies, “champion of a civilisation that for centuries has wreaked untold carnage throughout the world”.

The comedian Chris Morris described Amis as “the new Abu Hamza”, the Northern Ireland novelist Ronan Bennett expressed “shame” at Amis's views, which were “symptomatic of a much wider and deeper hostility to Islam”. And the Indian writer Pankaj Mishra inevitably accused Amis of combining a “patchy knowledge of world history” (as opposed, presumably to Mishra's own complete understanding) with “a primordial anxiety about cultural otherness”.

What Amis had really done, as the chronologically ordered pieces in this collection demonstrate, was to go on a political journey. This started, as for many of us, in the uncomprehending fug of ash, dust and speculation rising from Ground Zero. “Terrorism,” Amis wrote immediately afterwards, “is political communication by other means. The message of September 11 ran as follows: America, it is time you learned how implacably you are hated.” In other words, however bad the act, it was rational, somehow provoked and subject to the usual rules of politics.

But Amis, unlike many other writers, couldn't leave it at that. He began to look at the people who had carried out the attack, and, crucially, at the ideology that motivated them - in other words, at what they said and wrote.

What he discovered was not a group of misguided liberators, but of young men in love with the idea of death and violence, given justification by an implacable and totalitarian ideology. Amis went back to the mid-20th-century writings of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, men such as the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb - as someone might have returned to Mein Kampf in the early 1930s - and examined what was being taught. It is doubtful whether Eagleton - unlike Amis and tens of thousands of Islamists - has read a single word of Qutb's writings.

Through Qutb and others Amis came to the realisation, chronicled in The Second Plane, that Islamism itself was a problem, since what it loathed about the West was, as Amis puts it, not our active seductiveness, but our passive attraction. “We should understand,” he writes, “that Islamists' hatred of America is as much abstract as historical, and irrationally abstract too; none of the usual things can be expected to appease it.” Amis connects this existential envy to the political failure of Islam and attributes this in turn to the suppression of women in many Muslim countries.

Amis's conclusion that an ideological struggle must be waged, in which the proper values of the West are championed, is what brings him into such a collision with the Eagletons. This is, after all, a period in which part of the Left has - remarkably - thrown in its lot with the less apocalyptic wing of Islamism, as well as the isolationist right, in a sort of anti-imperialist alliance. Many of the rest - “liberal relativists” - have settled, in Amis's words, for a kind of “dissonant evasion” of the truth. This was bound to bring all of them into conflict with the man who is possibly the most fully engaged writer of our age.

The Second Plane by Martin Amis

Cape, £12.99; 224pp

Comments

[Matthew]

David,

I think you are rather misleading. Amis's comments weren't about his reaction to the London bombings, they were about suicide bombing in general (later Amis said that he said them on the day of the aborted airline attacks in 2006).

You describe them as a 'obviously not advocating discriminatory action against muslims' but the quote begins:

“What can we do to raise the price of them doing this?"

and then goes on to suggest - among other things - not letting Muslims travel, deporting them, and even strip-searching "people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan".

So whatever Amis says now, that's not how it seemed.

I would also note other comments he makes in interview, specifically this:

"It’s a very chilling thought because the only thing the Islamists like about modernity is modern weapons. And they’re going to get better and better at that. They’re also gaining on us demographically at a huge rate. A quarter of humanity now and by 2025 they’ll be a third. Italy’s down to 1.1 child per woman. We’re just going to be outnumbered."

Aside from being nonsensical (Islamists are born?), can you explain how you think this sub-Mark Steyn ranting is compatible with being liberal or on the left?

[Michael]

I think the comment above (Mathew) is lazy and misleading. Amis was not advocating the measures (deportation, strip-searching, he was not saying "this is what I think the Government should do".
His comment was much more nuanced, and subtle. My reading of it is that he was commenting that these are the ugly impulses that are expressed (or remain thought but not spoken) when terrorist acts are perceived to be perpetrated by a "minority" on the "majority".

With honesty, Amis admitted to knowing what that impulse felt like.

The nuance and subtlety were lost on many, preferring not to read closely and think, and instead seeing only a confirmation of their exsisitng opinions. But on my reading, Amis was expressing the honest view that in the times in which we are living, dangerous, violent impulses can develop, and sometimes will be encouraged by political and other leaders. It was a warning - quite the opposite to the way it has been interpreted.

Here's another link where Amis talks openly about ugly racist impulses.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article2658703.ece

[Stephen]

"and then goes on to suggest - "

The pharse "there is a definate URGE to SAY" is certainly not equivilant to suggesting/advocating.

"Islamists are born?"
The proportion of Islamists (tiny) is likely to remain the same. However, More Muslims = More Islamists is common sense.

[Matthew]

"what can we do to raise the price of them doing this" is pretty unequivocal.

I don't think I've been lazy here. I see your intepretation, but the problem is that Amis when he made a stab at explaining himself didn't suggest that was his line of thought, and Christopher Hitchens, his best mate, didn't read it like that either, nor it seems did the journalist who interviewed him.

"instead seeing only a confirmation of their exsisitng opinions". This certainly doesn't apply in my case - I was (and to some extent still am) a fan of Martin Amis. I just think he's bought too much of the Mark Steyn worldview of Muslims.

[Matthew]

Stephen - in the quote about 'them' gaining on us demographically, Amis doesn't differentiate between Islamists and Muslims.

I would also add that I just don't think most people do have those kind or 'urges' - to strip-search people simply because they look as if they might be Muslims. Did you?